[Perceval]

> > Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat

I think this is the crux of all the other socio-economic superstructure arguments the article's author makes. The assertion is that Tolkien's fantasy world of wizards, wraiths, walking trees, dragons, invisibility rings, dwarves, elves, etc would have a realistic medieval material production culture.

In order to imagine an idealized/fantasy bucolic shire, wouldn't Tolkien just imagine soil that's more fertile and nutritional crops with higher yield? Would this be the furthest he asks the reader to stretch their imagination?

[franciscop]

We already have a real-world example of that[1], which is in medieval times in China, the land was a lot more fertile than in Europe, and with a crop also more nutrition dense (rice). So what happened there is that, instead of achieving something similar to the Shire, the plots of land became smaller per family, to achieve again an equilibrium where each family had enough to eat for themselves, but not a lot to spare. So more fertile/nutritional crops, while it would def help the Shire, would not be the whole answer without some sort of population management.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...

[Perceval]

Yes, that's one example, but it's not the only way that species adapt to resource availability.

Ecologists have hypothesized r-selected and K-selected species as differing responses to resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Homo sapiens may be r-selected. Different cultures of homo sapiens may lean more toward r- or more towards K- (this is part of the thesis of Eric Jones's The European Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Miracle).

Insofar as Tolkien's work is a fantasy and Hobbits are not real, would it strain our credulity to imagine that they are K-selected?